Hey all! Here’s my latest Food 101 column, published in The Orange County Register’s print edition today. It’s not on the OCR site, so I’ve placed it here. Enjoy!

Go for croque
By CYNTHIA FUREY
Special to the Register

Not many can resist the call of buttery, crunchy sandwiches oozing with Gruyère and piled with lacy slices of Black Forest ham – especially the ones that require a knife and fork. These lunchtime and brunch-time French staples, called croque-madame and croque-monsieur, are simple ham and cheese sandwiches with toppings to dress them up. A bonus: The sandwiches can easily be prepared at home, usually for a fraction of the cost that a single croque would fetch at any restaurant.

Croque-madame and croque-monsieur are toasted in the oven so the ham heats through and the cheese melts into a blanket of gooey bliss. Croque-madame has an egg on top, its yolk serving as a sauce. Ditch the egg and ladle on some Mornay sauce, and you have a croque-monsieur. Because there is little preparation time, you can make both croque versions without spending all afternoon over your stove.

Traditionally, croque-madame’s egg is served sunny side up, but an egg cooked over easy works just as nicely. Part of the fun of eating a croque-madame is piercing the yolk with a fork and watching it dribble over the sandwich and rest in a puddle underneath. The other fun part is sopping up the puddle with the sandwich bread.

For the croque-monsieur, you will be making a Mornay sauce, which is essentially a béchamel sauce with cheese added. A béchamel is a milk- or cream-based sauce. It’s considered one of the five classical “mother sauces” – the others are Espagnole, made with brown stock; velouté, white stock; hollandaise, butter; and tomato sauce. With the addition of other ingredients, hundreds of sauces are derived from these five.

Start the béchamel by making a blond roux, made of equal parts butter and flour. Heat this mixture until the flour’s starchy flavor cooks away, leaving behind a nutty smell and flavor and an ivory or off-white mixture. The roux will help thicken the sauce once the milk is added, and the little bit of Gruyère added at the end will transform the béchamel into a Mornay. Once the sauce is ladled onto the sandwich, an additional bit of cheese goes on top to give that gorgeous, bubbly look when the sandwich is heated under the broiler.

You can serve these sandwiches with a spring salad, with french fries or as appetizers: Cut the sandwiches into smaller servings, skewer with a toothpick or wooden skewer and place on a tray. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

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So there’s a story making its rounds through many of the major news outlets right now claiming that read meat is harmful to your health. In fact, a headline from the San Francisco Chronicle grimly reads, “Study claims red meat can be deadly.” The lead:

“Eating red meat increases the chances of dying prematurely, according to a large federal study that offers powerful new evidence that a diet that regularly includes steaks, burgers and pork chops is hazardous to your health.”

By “regularly,” the National Cancer Institute study means “the equivalent of about a small hamburger every day.” It followed more than 500,000 people ages 50 to 71 over the span of 10 years. Those who ate meat “regularly” during the span were “30 percent more likely to die during the 10 years they were followed.” (click on this link to read exact numbers and other details.)

The problems I have with this study — thought it does present some useful information — is the “regularly” part. Does the general population really eat red meat daily? What if the study was on fish: If you ate tuna every single day, would you suffer the same (or similar) diseases as the red-meat-eating population? (Jeremy Piven’s mercury poisoning, anyone? Ha.) Do these findings reveal anything about people who eat red meat in moderation?

– Cynthia Furey

Side note: March madness is a month-long challenge in which I will post Monday through Friday for the entire month. Thank you for reading!

If ever I opened a restaurant, it would be modeled after the Ramos House Café.

The San Juan Capistrano, Calif.-eatery is as romantic as it gets. It’s nestled in the heart of the city’s Spanish-influenced downtown area where kitschy shops share narrow roads with tiny, 19th-century homes built by early settlers whose future generations still live there today. This is the kind of place you bring your out-of-town guests to fall in love with California — if they haven’t already.

Being there is like traveling back in time when everything was made from scratch, from food to clothes – when nary a homeowner’s association existed to send these residents angry letters about unruly gardens or wrong choice of paint color. Here, beauty is achieved without conformity.

The Ramos House itself was built in 1881. Chef/owner/CIA grad John Humphreys lives there, cooking meals out of his home (in an updated commercial kitchen) to diners he serves on his covered patio. The bathroom is a converted outhouse, while herbs used are grown on site.

Humphreys’ food is of the southern variety, like the kind I imagine you’d eat on the wraparound porch of a Georgia plantation home. Buttermilk biscuits, citrus compound butters and jam are made by hand. Dishes are homey, and some are given a California twist that lightens the fare — like the macaroni and cheese with artichokes and lemon.

Beignets are pillowy, with textbook-perfect brunoise of apple (We should expect nothing less from a CIA grad). The crab hash, dotted with crispy bacon, scrambled eggs and sweet potato curls is my go-to. And if it’s on the menu, a slice of huckleberry coffee cake is a great way to start or end a meal. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more.)

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